What do libertarians believe in? In a few words, they believe that individual
freedom is the fundamental value that must underlie all social relations,
economic exchanges and the political system. They believe that voluntary
co-operation between individuals in a free market is always preferable
to coercion exerted by the state. They believe that the role of the state
is not to pursue goals in the name of the community. The state is not there
to redistribute wealth, "promote" culture, "support" the agricultural sector,
or "help" small firms, but should limit itself to the protection of individual
rights and let citizens pursue their own goals in a peaceful way.

Essentially
libertarians preach freedom in all fields, including the right
to do what one wants with one's own body insofar as one does
not infringe on the property and equal freedom of others.
Accordingly, they believe that people who want to take drugs,
watch pornography, prostitute themselves or pay for the
services of a prostitute, or engage in whatever kind of
consensual sexual activity, should be able to do so without
being importuned by the law and harassed by the police.

However, as
libertarians – that is, notwithstanding their own personal
preferences – they no more advocate a libertine way of life
than any other, and one should not confuse the two words. What
they say is that each and every person must be able to choose
their own beliefs and the way of life that is appropriate to
them, be it asceticism or libertinage, religious moralism or
moral relativism. Libertarians will defend the right of the
libertine to live in debauchery as well as that of religious
fundamentalist parents to educate their children in accordance
with their own very strict beliefs.

Libertarians support
the formal equality of each and all before the law, but they
worry little about the inequalities between rich and poor,
inequalities which are inevitable and can be reduced only by
encroaching on personal freedom and by reducing overall
prosperity. For them, the best way to fight poverty is to
guarantee a system of free enterprise and free trade and to
let private charity initiatives, which are more effective and
better justified morally than state programmes of wealth
transfer, come to the rescue of those in need.

Libertarians believe
that the only way to ensure the maintenance of personal
freedom is to guarantee the inviolability of private property
and to limit as much as possible the size of the government
and the scope of its interventions. They do not trust the
state – whose managers claim to act in the name of abstract
collective interests – when it comes to protecting individual
liberty. According to collectivist ideologies, a viable social
and economic order can only be imposed and maintained by the
state. On the contrary, libertarian scholars have shown that
it is the decentralized actions of individuals who pursue
their own ends in a free market which makes it possible to
create and maintain this spontaneous order, to bring
prosperity, and to support the complex civilization in which
we live.

Thus libertarians
reject the main political development of the 20th century,
that is, the sustained growth in the size of the state and the
range of its interventions in the private lives of citizens.
To take one striking example, in 1926, public expenditures as
a percentage of Canada's gross national product amounted to
only 15%; today, that figure is around 46%.

Libertarians
vs. conservatives

Within the North American political framework of the period
after Word War II, libertarians have allied themselves with
conservatives in their fight against communism and socialism.
This is why many people tend to confuse both philosophies and
to put them on the right-hand side of the political spectrum,
following the confused model of right vs. left which is still
widely used to categorize political ideologies. But
libertarians are opposed to conservatives on several points,
in particular on social issues where conservatives often try
to impose their traditional values on all by using the
coercive power of the state, for example, when they support
making drugs and prostitution illegal or when they advocate
official discrimination against homosexuals. On issues related
to defense and foreign relations, conservatives are inclined
to support militarism and imperialist interventions abroad,
while libertarians advocate, when possible, isolationism and
non-involvement in foreign conflicts.

In fact,
conservatives value authority in itself and do not oppose
state power in principle, doing so only when its aims are not
the same as theirs. On the contrary, libertarians reject any
form of government intervention. Many of them think they do
not qualify as right-wingers and that the right/left spectrum
should be replaced by another one which would place the
statists and authoritarians of left and right on one side and
the supporters of personal freedom of the other.

Libertarians are thus opposed to collectivist ideologies of all types,
be they of the left or of the right, which stress the primacy of the group:
nation, social class, sexual or ethnic group, religious or language community,
etc. They oppose all whose purpose it is to regiment individuals in the
pursuit of collective goals. They do not deny the relevance of these collective
identities, but claim that it is up to the individuals themselves to determine
which groups they wish to belong and contribute to. It is not for the state,
or for institutions that derive their power from the state, to impose their
own objectives in a bureaucratic and coercive manner.

In the ongoing debate
over Quebec's "national question" for example, most
libertarians reject the independence project because its
primary aim is to impose a Quebec state which will be
stronger, more interventionist and more repressive towards
those who do not fit in the nationalist definition of
Quebecois identity. This being said, libertarians are not
enthusiastic federalist patriots either and they reject
Canadian nationalism and protectionism in the same way, as
well as the interventionism and administrative tyranny of the
federal government. They do not see why they should choose
between two states that infringe on our freedom more or less
equally. Rather, they would want to see both federal and
provincial governments reduced in size as much as possible.

An
heir to classical liberalism

Although it remains relatively little known and little
understood today because of the near total submission of
Western intellectual life to collectivist thinking throughout
the 20th century, libertarian philosophy is not a weird
marginal philosophy, only propagated by a small group of
utopians disconnected from reality. On the contrary, it is
heir to the most important Western political and economic
school of the last centuries, classical liberalism, a
philosophy elaborated by thinkers such as John Locke and Adam
Smith. Beginning in the 17th century, it is the liberals who
fought for a widening of political, economic and social
freedoms, against the power of the monarchs and the privileges
of the aristocrats. Liberal principles are at the root of the
American Constitution, and one can say that the United States
as well as Great Britain and Canada were largely governed in a
liberal way throughout the 19th century and up to the
beginning of the 20th.

Then, why not use the word liberal instead of libertarian? Because
this term, precisely since the end of the 19th century, took
on new meanings which are not at all compatible with the defense of individual freedom. In Great Britain, in Canada
and in Quebec, supposedly liberal parties are in fact only a
little more moderate than avowed socialists in their
inclination to use state power and in their lack of respect
for individual rights.

Worse still, in the
United States, a liberal is a left-winger who advocates
wealth redistribution and supports a big government that
interferes everywhere in people's lives. A government that
tries to solve all real and imaginary problems by taxing and
spending, and creates bureaucratic programs for each good
cause. In short, today's liberalism aims at creating a
tyrannical state that does not hesitate to trample on
individual freedom in the name of an unattainable
collectivist Utopia. This type of liberalism has nothing to
do with classical liberalism.

Today's libertarians
are inspired by former periods of liberal progress but,
after one century during which collectivist and totalitarian
ideologies have dominated, they realize that classical
liberalism was not strong or principled enough to stem the
rising tide of statism. They are more coherent or, some may
say, radical, than traditional liberals in their defense of
personal freedom and the market economy and in their
opposition to state power.

A
pluralistic movement

Like all philosophical movements, libertarianism is varied,
containing several schools and sub-groups, and one will find
no unanimity about its theoretical justifications, its goals
or the strategy that it should adopt to reach them. In North
America, a majority of those who call themselves
libertarians would like to see the state brought back to a
few essential functions: in particular defense, foreign
relations, justice, the protection of private property and
individual rights, and some other minor responsibilities.
All remaining functions should be privatized. In the context
of a very decentralized federal state, libertarians accept
however that local authorities (constituent States,
provinces, regions or municipalities) can intervene in other
fields and offer various types of social and economic
arrangements, insofar as dissatisfied citizens can easily
move to other jurisdictions.

Some libertarians of
the "anarcho-capitalist" school advocate the complete
disappearance of the state and the privatization of even the
basic functions mentioned above. This goal may appear
extreme or ridiculous at first sight, but it is based on a
theoretically plausible argument. It is for example easy to
imagine that one could replace provincial, State or
municipal police forces (with the corruption, abuses of
power, the incompetence and favouritism which usually
characterize them, all done often with impunity) with
private security agencies. These would make profits only
insofar as they really protect citizens and fight real
criminals. Anarcho-capitalists use the same type of
arguments to support the privatization of the army and the
courts, which would leave nothing for a state to do. Private
firms would then provide all the services that individuals
might need in a pure free market.

In a context
where public spending now accounts for almost half of all
that is produced, where governments continue to adopt law
after law so as to increase their control over our lives, a
more realistic libertarian goal is simply to reverse this
trend and fight for any practical advancement of freedom and
any concrete reduction in state tyranny.

Libertarians are the
only ones willing to enter this fight without compromising
their beliefs. The fact is that the current ideological
debate remains dominated by statists, despite the
superficial political controversies that attract media
attention.

On one side,
socialists and leftist supporters of unlimited growth in the
size of government make up a strong majority among lobbies
feeding at the public trough, in universities and in the
media. Most of what passes for journalism or academic
research shows a complete lack of understanding of the basic
rules of a market economy. In the "centre", those who claim
to be "realistic" admit that the state cannot continue to
increase the tax burden and grow indefinitely, but they
simply preach a slowing down of this growth. The business
establishment for its part would be satisfied with some
minor cuts here and there and few of its members question
the corporatist structure of the state. As for those on the
Right who are described as radical "neo-conservatives",
their stated aim is to bring us back to where we were 20 or
30 years ago when the ratio of state expenditures to GDP was
5 or 10 percentage points smaller. A step that would be in
the right direction, but one that is hardly sufficient.

Also, one has to
admit that the so-called "conservative revolutions" of the
past 20 years in Britain, Canada and the United States have
not really produced major change, although some useful
economic reforms and tax cuts were implemented. Few programmes and laws were abolished and the state still
occupies a dominant place in economic and social life. It is
even to be feared that bureaucratic programmes will start
growing again now that budget deficits have been eliminated
and that governments have surplus revenues to spend.

Libertarians are the only ones who demand and work for radical change,
a drastic reduction of the size and role of the state, they are the only
ones who value individual freedom above all else. More and more people
realize that libertarianism constitutes the only alternative. The libertarian
movement hardly existed in the 1960's and really took off in the United
States in the early 1970's. The U.S. Libertarian Party, founded in 1971,
is now third in importance after the Republicans and the Democrats. Whereas
collectivist philosophies and Keynesian economics used to dominate academic
life, recently there has been a revival of interest in classical liberalism
and free market economics in the universities. Finally, today, libertarian
philosophy can be found everywhere on the Internet and its influence is
growing in every continent.

Thus we can hope realistically that a century after the eclipse of classical
liberalism, its libertarian offspring will once again become an influential
philosophical doctrine and movement in the 21st century.